p>There is a quiet revolution happening as music consumers are awakening from their unfortunate fourteen year mp3-induced low-res slumber as high resolution music becomes increasingly available and affordable.

Maybe we’re all concerned with the wrong thing. Maybe the size of a service is not the bellwether of that service’s viability. Maybe there’s room for a service with a vast audience of 20,000,000 listeners as well as a service that provides a high-quality product specifically for people who care about that sort of thing.

Fifteen years ago or so, as a point of marketing, it was not the quality of the music you could now carry around with you, it was the amount of music you could carry around with you. Today we are still using a format that was a cutting edge technology at the time it was developed, even though that format (and the storage capacities of the devices we now use) has long ago been surpassed with other compression codecs.